From Toy Cars to PEZ Dispensers to Oil Lanterns, Vermonters Love Their Unusual Collections

Almost everyone collects something. Even if you don’t identify as a “collector,” you probably hold on to keepsakes and mementos for any number of reasons — or no reason at all. Maybe you save smooth, ocean-tumbled rocks from family trips to Maine. Or you keep a stash of snow globes in your office year-round. Or you’ve got a jar of belly button lint on your desk. (We’re not here to judge.)

While most people’s collecting habits can be described as casual, Vermont is home to some more serious collectors. Mark Waskow, for example, owns the state’s largest collection of contemporary local art: more than 15,000 pieces that he stores around the state. Musician and Vermont Public radio host Robert Resnik boasts an astounding assemblage of musical instruments — and, we’re told, an impressive cache of hot sauces. Christine Farrell, founder and owner of Earth Prime Comics in Burlington, is rumored to have one of the largest and oldest private collections of comic books in the world.

Recently, Seven Days staffers wondered what other kinds of collections — and collectors — might be out there. A call for submissions on social media prompted a deluge of responses from Vermonters who collect everything from creepy dolls to vintage lunch boxes to board games to VHS tapes. And PEZ dispensers. Lots and lots of PEZ dispensers.

As we dug in, other tips followed: a man who collects Coleman lanterns in southern Vermont; another who collects old matchbooks; still more PEZ dispensers; and, yes, someone who hoards their own belly button lint. (Sadly, if predictably, that last person declined to speak with us. We had questions.)

Frankly, there were too many interesting collections to choose from. As we visited some of them, we learned what’s most fascinating about collecting is not so much the objects themselves as the people who gather them and the stories behind their obsessions.

In New Haven, for example, a troubled U.S. Army veteran found meaning and a new path through a Japanese anime series. In Richmond, a grieving family keeps the memory of a loved one alive in a collection of toy cars. And an Underhill postal worker looks to preserve Vermont’s fading history in a vast assortment of obscure ephemera.

Of course, not all collections are imbued with meaning. Some collectors just collect cool stuff because, well, it’s cool. Take the Burlington musician who owns a trove of Leon Redbone memorabilia — including a couple of his guitars. Or the Grateful Dead fan who kept collecting plush dancing bears because she couldn’t stop. Or the local engineer whose collection of space toys boldly goes where no one has gone before.

Read on for some of the most unusual and compelling special collections in Vermont.

— Dan Bolles

---

Catching the Bug

A fleet of tiny Volkswagens helps keep the memory of Tim Whiteford close for his family

Tim Whiteford’s family is still discovering new cars in his collection of miniature Volkwagens. On a recent Saturday, his daughter, Marie Claire Johnson, found a landline phone in the shape of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle tucked on a lower shelf in the room where Tim stored his fleet. Her husband, Erik Johnson, and son Lachlan dusted it off, found a couple of AA batteries and plugged it into a phone jack in the wall. Erik called it from his mobile — and it still worked. The headlights flickered as it rang.

Though Tim died four years ago, his collection of VW Beetle and bus memorabilia remains largely untouched. Lachlan, 8, did some back-of-the-napkin math and calculated that there are nearly 1,000 Volkswagen items in his grandfather’s collection — lovingly arranged on handmade shelves in a small sunroom in his grandparents’ Richmond home.

“Our house is covered in Volkswagen posters, and there’s Bugs everywhere.” Marie Claire Johnson

The collection is delightful, especially viewed up close. There are tiny Beetles — or, more familiarly, “Bugs” — a one-wheeled version and another with a clock on its hood. There’s a Gremlins Bug still in the box. One Bug breaks into two pieces — salt and pepper shakers. There’s a necklace charm, a bath toy, a jewelry box and even a Beetle-shaped bottle that still contains Avon Wild Country aftershave.

“This was the first one. This was the beginning,” Tim’s wife, Lucie Whiteford, said as she held a metal, lime-green Vanagon.

Lucie bought the toy van for her husband at a flea market in the early 1990s, knowing that Tim drove a 1960s Volkswagen Transporter van as a young man and saw Volkswagens as a connection to his British upbringing. “From then on, it was like anytime you see a VW anywhere, you get it. Always,” she recalled.

Lucie said Tim would often go to the Waterbury flea market with his son, Andrew, now 30. “There was always a basket of cars, and they would rifle through them to see if they could spot one,” she said. “Sometimes you would find a treasure at the flea market.”

Tim was a warm and easygoing person who taught math education at Trinity College in Burlington and Saint Michael’s College in Colchester. He loved music and performed in the local Irish and Scottish band the Highland Weavers. Tim saw life as a road and told Marie Claire to “just enjoy the drive.” Marie Claire said her father encouraged her to pursue her own passions but also to create opportunities for others. “You’ve got to support passion because it’s what makes the drive enjoyable,” she said.

Tim encouraged Andrew to collect as well, and he’s amassed more than 300 Hot Wheels cars. Tim built a track for the cars in the sunroom, and father and son would spend hours shooting the cars up and down its ramp.

Tim told Marie Claire stories about driving around England as a young man in his Vanagon looking for hitchhikers who needed a ride. “I think there’s something about this [collection] that is youthful,” she said. “For him, it made a lot of sense because of the connection to his childhood and his motherland and his passion for driving and vehicles.” Tim was an auto enthusiast throughout his life, owning numerous VW vehicles, including a maroon 1991 VW van, which he sold to his daughter for just a dollar.

“The passion is very catching,” Marie Claire said. “Our house is covered in Volkswagen posters, and there’s Bugs everywhere.”

Tim handed down certain cars to her sons, Lachlan and Kassel, 6, who now have their own mini collection. Despite the uncertainties about buying a car on eBay, Marie Claire supported her husband in a bidding war for an orange 1974 VW Beetle, which he won. “This is the only car that I can do this with and get away with it,” Erik joked.

Though the VW room remains much as Tim left it, it has been maintained. And despite her husband’s death, Lucie said, the collection continues to expand: “Still to this day, when I see one, I buy it.”

— Colleen Goodhue

---

A Rare Vintage

Retro rocker Billy Bratcher curates a curious music legend

Billy Bratcher has come unstuck in time.

When I stepped onto his Burlington front porch, he was picking a vintage acoustic guitar in an old-timey style that conjured up early 20th-century jazz and blues. The guitar was a 1934 Martin — one of several such gems that Bratcher owns. And the sound? “All those licks I learned from Redbone,” Bratcher said.

He was referring to the late Leon Redbone, the eccentric, anachronistic musician renowned for his roots-jazz-blues guitar work, languid vocal style, and signature sunglasses and Panama hat. Starting on the folk festival circuit in the early 1970s, Redbone was like a vaudeville performer who didn’t realize (or care) that other circuit was over.

Bratcher, who’s known to local music fans as the upright bass player in the rockabilly group Starline Rhythm Boys, made Redbone’s personal acquaintance in 2012. When the enigmatic entertainer died in 2019, Bratcher acquired a trove of Redbone’s effects, including two sweet old guitars. The items are in the right hands with Bratcher, a seasoned collector of vintage 78 rpm records and guitars of another era.

“I like being surrounded by old, unique things.” Billy Bratcher

After the porch prelude, we headed into Bratcher’s house, where we prepped for awakening Redbone’s spirit at a turntable, listening to some 78s. Bratcher has pared down his inventory from about 3,000 to 1,000 discs in recent years. Among those he kept are all five Elvis Presley Sun Records releases. Bratcher calls the downsizing “getting clean” from a 78-record-collecting problem.

We moved along to a glass showcase that is the Redbone archive. It contains an eclectic array of artifacts: concert posters and photographs, including one of Redbone as a guest on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”; volumes from Redbone’s music history library; a microphone; one of Redbone’s walking sticks; one of his hallmark hats; and unmixed studio tapes from recording sessions.

The most anticipated pieces on this tour of Bratcher’s collection are the two guitars. The oldest, a 1930 National, shines like silver with its unique metal body. Redbone played it in the “Tonight Show” appearance.

Bratcher also owns Redbone’s early 1960s Harmony guitar, which Redbone played at the Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto Island in 1972 — when, according to lore, Bob Dylan sought out this curious up-and-comer. Redbone’s Harmony guitar bears the musician’s handiwork: a painted-over brand name on the headstock and tiny flowers painted around the perimeter of the body. Bratcher called these “vagabond” embellishments.

Bratcher estimates the 15 pieces in the Redbone collection are worth roughly $15,000 on the collector’s market. But their greater value, to him, lies in connecting to Redbone through his instruments.

“I picked with Leon,” he said. “To be able to play the style that he plays on his guitars is just so fulfilling to me. It’s almost surreal.”

Even as he channels Redbone, Bratcher’s mind can wander to the one that got away: the 1956 Gibson CF-100, Redbone’s go-to guitar. When Redbone died, widow Beryl Handler offered to sell Bratcher the axe, but he declined, thinking the guitar should stay in Redbone’s family. “It haunts me,” he said. “I think about it a lot.”

Bratcher can only hope the Gibson is in good hands. He’s more certain about where he’d like to see Redbone’s legacy land upon his own death: either at the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in Nashville, Tenn., or “in the hands of another player who appreciates it as much as I,” he said.

The thought gives Bratcher pause. Glancing around his place, one spots evidence that he collects more than music memorabilia: movie posters, antique tin toys and a worn copy of Sports Collectors Digest, the publication of record for people like the avid baseball card collector that Bratcher once was.

“I like being surrounded by old, unique things,” he said.

— Erik Esckilsen

---

Heads and Tales

For George DeCell, PEZ spells something sweeter than sugar

Vermont’s top PEZ-head is jonesing for “no feet.”

For most of the candy-consuming world, PEZ is a rainbow-hued mini brick of sugar stacked inside a BIC lighter-shaped dispenser that pops out a piece when the topper is pulled back. For George DeCell and thousands of his PEZ-head brethren, PEZ is all about the container, not the contents. He collects sets of dispensers — four to seven on a single theme, such as Batman characters — that are never, ever opened, lest they lose some value.

And value is the reason that PEZ is reportedly one of the most collected items on the planet. Pristine sets sell for hundreds of dollars. Vintage PEZ produced before 1980 with no “feet” on the stem — more on this later — can fetch four figures. The rarest of the rare — the Good Lord Bird of PEZ-dom — is said to be the “Political Donkey,” produced in 1961 and valued at $13,000.

Now, that’s a stocking stuffer!

DeCell, a construction manager for an excavation company, said he’s more of a bargain than a big-game hunter. He looks for assorted PEZ characters sold in quantity that contain pieces he needs to complete sets of related characters — sort of like filling in a gin rummy hand.

“It’s like anything else,” he said. “If you do it right, you can create a collection that’s worth money and not spend a fortune.”

DeCell’s Fairfax home looks like the PEZ warehouse fell off a truck and landed in his basement. If those little bricks were gold, his home would be Fort Knox. “It combines two of my favorite things: toys and candy,” DeCell, 52, said. His collection includes PEZ cereal, with real cereal in the box topper; PEZ NASCAR; PEZ watches; and PEZ for Pets, with bricks made of kibble. DeCell has a Spider-Man PEZ he said is valued at $800.

Forget what you think you know about PEZ. It was invented in Austria in 1927 by a confectioner named Eduard Haas III, who aimed to corner the then-nonexistent market of breath mints that discouraged smoking. The name derives from the German word for peppermint: Pfefferminz. Haas created his immortal Wordle by combining the first, middle and last letters to spell PEZ.

PEZ hit America’s shores in 1952, with the dispensers that contained the 12 little bricks bearing images of Popeye, Santa Claus, and Disney stalwarts Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. In 1973, a PEZ factory opened in Orange, Conn.; it now also functions as a visitor center and museum, displaying many of the 1,500 unique PEZ dispensers. In 1980, bottom pieces or feet were added to the stems to help them stand up better, making the vintage footless pieces the stuff of DeCell’s dreams.

DeCell still checks eBay and attends collector conventions (PEZamania in Ohio, anyone?), searching for new acquisitions. But he said he intends to give some sets away or sell a few to buy something nice for Estelle, his very tolerant wife. The collection is “insured and well secured,” DeCell said, but he has occasionally taken it out into the world.

“I used to substitute teach in the Fairfax schools,” he explained. To gain better control over the students, DeCell would come to class with one of the giant, 13-inch-tall PEZ dispensers he’s collected. “I’d flip open the top,” he said, “and an entire PEZ package would pop out. It got their attention.”

— Steve Goldstein

---

See the Light

A basement full of Coleman lanterns means never having to be in the dark

Chad Farnum of Brattleboro bought his first Coleman lantern nine years ago. He was in the process of restoring a vintage Serro Scotty camper, envisioning road trips and weekends in the woods with his family. The forest green lantern, made the same year as the camper — 1976 — seemed like just the right accessory to bring along.

Soon Farnum realized that Coleman made red lanterns as well as green ones. He discovered Coleman’s “big hat” lanterns, with wider tops that cast the light downward. He learned that some lanterns had single mantles — the flame-powered light source — and others had double mantles. He was hooked. He went on eBay to look for lanterns, then got off eBay because it was too easy to find what he wanted. He turned to flea markets and antiques stores.

“It became about the hunt,” he said.

Today, Farnum owns 60 or 70 lanterns, plus a few dozen flashlights. Most were manufactured in the 1960s and ’70s; a few date back to the 1920s. He typically picks them up for $25 or $30 apiece and insists he won’t pay more than $100 unless it’s a rarer find, like the yellow lanterns Coleman made for the Gold Bond trading stamps company in the early 1970s. That’s the one model Farnum is still seeking. Otherwise, he said, “It’s not a superexpensive hobby. It’s not like I’m collecting motorcycles.”

Farnum, 50, used to work as a carpenter and builder and then founded his own company, Farnum Insulators, so he knows his way around tools. When he adds a lantern to his collection, he takes it apart, cleans it and, if necessary — and if he can find the original parts — installs a new glass globe or a new generator (which makes the liquid fuel vaporize). “Pretty much every single one I can get to light up,” he said.

That functionality is what drew Farnum to lanterns. “I like to collect things that I’m going to use,” he explained, “whether it’s the lanterns or flashlights for camping, or the grills for when I have people over for dinner.” (Yes, grills — he’s got nine of them.)

Farnum doesn’t just bring one lantern for camping. When he and his wife and daughter would travel to Vermont state parks and Acadia National Park in Maine with their camper in tow, he’d bring along 10 lanterns, give or take. “I’d set them up and tinker with them,” he said. “It was a little obsessive.”

Later, when his daughter was in high school, Farnum would hang the lanterns around his backyard pool on summer nights so she and her friends could see as they swam.

When people ask why he collects lanterns, Farnum tells them he was afraid of the dark as a kid. “That’s my joke,” he said. “But when the power goes out, it’s pretty nice to have a whole bunch of lanterns and flashlights around.”

Does that mean Farnum’s family appreciates his collection? “They humor me,” he said — though they were unaware of the extent of his obsession until he started gathering the lanterns and flashlights in one place. “My daughter thinks I’m a little nuts, and my wife is willing to put up with it as long as it stays in the man cave,” Farnum said, referring to his basement.

He’s OK with that. Eventually, he’ll thin out his collection, he said, and sell some of his lanterns to other collectors who will appreciate them as much as he does.

“These things were built 75, 80 years ago,” he said, “and a lot of them still work the way they did when they were made, which to me is really cool. You just don’t find that much anymore.”

— Jennifer Sutton

---

Ripple Effect

On tour with Jessica Wetherby’s Grateful Dead dancing bears

On her 16th birthday, Jessica Wetherby started on a long, strange trip that would last the next quarter of a century and beyond. Wetherby was visiting family in Tennessee when her aunt, a Grateful Dead fan, gave her a birthday present befitting a young Deadhead: a small, plush replica of one of the Dead’s famed dancing bears.

The doll was made by Liquid Blue, a company that specializes in psychedelic band, sports and pop culture apparel — think tie-dyed Dead T-shirts, New York Yankees hoodies and Cheech & Chong tank tops. In 1997, on the heels of the Beanie Baby craze, Liquid Blue began producing a line of collectible beanie bears licensed by the Grateful Dead and modeled on the band’s signature icon.

“Once I had so many editions, I was like, Well, I can’t stop now.” Jessica Wetherby

Each came with a name that often referenced a Dead song, such as “Samson and Delilah” and “Sugaree” — Wetherby’s first bear was “Tennessee Jed.” The bears also had “birth dates” from specific Dead shows and came with a “Favorite Tour Memory,” a fictionalized account of life on the road with the band.

“I just fell in love with them,” Wetherby said recently from her St. Albans home, where she lives with her husband, two children and about 150 Liquid Blue bears. “To me, the Grateful Dead concept, the dancing bears — it was always just a joyful, happy thing. And I was 16, so they were cute, too.”

Precise information is hard to pin down — because hippies — but Liquid Blue produced at least 16 “generations” of the bears, 10 to 12 at a time, in the decade-plus after their introduction. The designs became increasingly colorful over the years, made with an eclectic array of fabric patterns. Liquid Blue also released a few special editions, such as larger bears and holiday versions, and a Jerry Garcia doll.

Wetherby said she has “pretty much all” of the Liquid Blue bears, keeping track of them with a checklist. She doesn’t know, or particularly care, how much her collection is worth. But complete sets of individual generations of the bears can sell for anywhere from $200 to several thousand on eBay. Certain rare bears can fetch a few hundred on their own.

Asked why she collects the bears, Wetherby cited her love of the Grateful Dead, which she attributes to the influence of her Deadhead aunt. While she never saw the band live before Garcia died in 1995, Wetherby has seen post-Garcia versions and Dead-adjacent offshoots, and she’s a fan of several local Dead tribute bands.

“Grateful Dead are definitely one of my favorites,” she said.

Wetherby also described her competitive nature as a factor in her dancing bear obsession. A lifelong athlete, she played soccer through college before moving on to boxing, MMA fighting and Spartan races as an adult.

“Once I had so many editions, I was like, Well, I can’t stop now. I want to be the person who has ’em all,” she said. After a pause, she added with a chuckle, “It did get to a point where I wondered what I was going to do with them all.”

A stay-at-home mom, Wetherby put her bears in storage bins when her son Dominic, now 19 months old, was born. Until then, the bears had occupied a home office, but “we really needed the room,” she said.

One day, she hopes to display the bears again. Despite their increasing value, she said she has no plans to part with any of them.

“There’s just something about them,” she said, “and I just can’t let go.”

— Dan Bolles

---

Party Platters

Jim Beebe-Woodard’s Fiestaware serves up a slice of American history

In 1936, America was crawling out of the Great Depression and looking toward a brighter future. Literal proof sat on the nation’s dining tables, set with Homer Laughlin China’s new line of affordable Fiesta dishware. It was advertised in “five lovely colors … all brilliant, all eye-catching, all modern.” The cheerful red, cobalt blue, green, yellow and ivory mix-and-match dishes with sleek curves and decorative rings signaled in name and spirit that it was time to celebrate again.

The zeitgeist symbolized by the art deco-influenced dishes and their colorful charm made Jim Beebe-Woodard a Fiesta collector. Half a lifetime ago, he bought his first two plates at a Cambridge, Mass., antiques shop.

“It’s so deco, so bright, so distinctive. It captures a moment in American history,” said the impressively bearded 51-year-old, who lives with his husband, Travis, in an artfully furnished house in Underhill. “They told housewives, ‘You can have this gay table,'” Beebe-Woodard observed with a chuckle; the description appealed to him on multiple levels.

“I friggin’ love these” Jim Beebe-Woodard”

Among the home’s vintage and handcrafted décor, a large, glass-doored IKEA bookcase stands out. It holds most of Beebe-Woodard’s 400-piece Fiesta collection, including his original ivory and chartreuse plates, iconic pitchers in yellow and juniper, and a full set of Fiesta Casuals in the 1962 Hawaiian 12-Point Daisy design.

“I friggin’ love these,” Beebe-Woodard said of the turquoise-flowered dishes, which he used to host the couple’s first post-lockdown brunch in March 2021.

For more than a decade, Beebe-Woodard’s prized collection sat boxed in the attic for lack of the “perfect midcentury hutch,” he admitted. Finally, he accepted that his rainbow of dishware deserved to be on display, even if in a mass-produced piece of furniture. It’s appropriate in a way, since Fiesta, like IKEA, strove to make well-designed housewares widely accessible — albeit when mass-market products were of higher quality.

Fiestaware has been crafted in America since 1936, with a break from 1973 to 1985. The classic line has come in 55 colors including the original red, which famously contained a small amount of uranium and rendered dishes slightly radioactive. Beebe-Woodard finds that “kind of cool.”

The couple eats daily on “new” Fiesta produced since 1986, but Beebe-Woodard also puts his vintage items to occasional use. He loves to spoon potato-leek soup from cream soup bowls and serve mashed potatoes in a lidded ivory casserole with delicately curved handles, which dates back to Fiesta’s first 15 years.

Beebe-Woodard doesn’t track his collection’s value, but one of his rarer pieces — a teapot in a color called “medium green” made in the 1960s — would easily fetch more than $1,000. He said he was lucky to get the teapot for a bargain from an old friend of his husband’s grandmother.

The couple had no idea what to expect when they headed with Grammy to her friend Dottie’s house one snowy day. Dottie was about to move into assisted living, and Grammy had said she had “some of those dishes.” While the women caught up, Beebe-Woodard noticed a smattering of Fiestaware in the kitchen but nothing especially notable.

Then, he recounted, “All of sudden, Dottie looks at me and she’s like, ‘So, you want to see it?'” In her dining room, she opened three cabinets chock-full of Fiesta that made Beebe-Woodard’s jaw drop. “Every successive door that [she] opened,” Travis said, “his eyes got bigger and bigger.”

During that first visit, Beebe-Woodard bought eight pieces. Dottie has since given him a number more.

When he’s ready to downsize, Beebe-Woodard has no plans to sell his collection to strangers. “I hope I can do what Dottie did,” he said. “To get them in this way is beautiful.”

— Melissa Pasanen

---

Picking It Up

Jerry Russin Jr. preserves bygone Vermont culture, one curio at a time

Jerry Russin Jr. is a picker. He spends his spare time in barns and attics looking through people’s forgotten stuff. With an avid interest in Vermont history and culture, Russin is on the prowl for objects and memorabilia that say something about the way Vermonters lived in decades and centuries past.

His collection includes vintage signs (“Carriages/Road Wagons,” announces an Enosburgh business), Walton’s Vermont Register and Farmers’ Almanacs that date back to the 1850s, antique druggists’ bottles embossed with mortars and pestles, and scores of old maple syrup tins. When he displays objects from his eclectic collection in his Jericho apartment, Russin feels like he’s living in an old-time general store, he said.

“It’s all dedicated to Vermont,” Russin, 26, said. “This is stuff that really needed to be saved before it was too late.”

His collection includes a turn-of the-century tin that held 17 pounds of chicken bones from a company in White River Junction called Smith & Son. Another container from the same era was once filled with 10 pounds of cottage cheese produced at the Bellows Falls Co-operative Creamery; its blue lettering says the brand was Brookside. Russin also has a 19th-century bottle whose label promises “instant relief” — the vegetable liniment that was within cost $1 and, the label directs, should be “corked tight.”

Objects of greater historical significance are also part of Russin’s collection, such as a document signed by governor Thomas Chittenden, the first (and third) governor of Vermont. The “warrant” dated October 29, 1796, concerns the election of a representative to the U.S. Congress from the “Western District” of Vermont. The governor directed the convening of special freemen’s meetings to elect a representative because no candidate had received a majority of votes in a prior election.

Matthew Lyon of Arlington, who won the contest, would later become the only member of Congress who’s been elected from jail —the first, but perhaps not last, federal official to ascend to office from prison.

Russin showed this document to folks from the PBS TV show “Antiques Roadshow” when they visited Shelburne Museum last summer. They estimated its value at $500 to $1,000, he said.

A postal worker in Underhill, Russin has multigenerational roots in the Underhill-Jericho area. He graduated from Mount Mansfield Union High School in Jericho but spent most of ninth grade in Florida. While he was living there, he developed an interest in his home state.

“I realized that I had taken Vermont for granted,” Russin said.

When he came back, he delved into local history before broadening his interest and subsequent collecting to the whole state. He’s become passionate about finding, saving and cataloging objects related to Vermont history. A network of friends and other pickers knows of his interest and alerts him to estate sales and other sources of Vermonty stuff.

Russin keeps his growing collection, which he estimates comprises at least 2,000 objects, in his apartment and in storage. He hopes when people learn about it, they might be inspired to discover more about Vermont.

“I think there’s a slight cultural identity crisis,” Russin said.

— Sally Pollak

---

Rocket Man

Scott Turnbull’s space memorabilia collection is out of this world

“‘Star Trek’ or Star Wars?”

“Yes,” Scott Turnbull replied.

Turnbull wants it all. A query meant to reveal the galaxial preference of space nerds is irrelevant to a man who has been accumulating rockets; robots; and replicas of astronauts, aliens and all manner of otherworldly objects for 50 years.

Encountering Turnbull’s display, which in large part chronicles the history of space exploration, is like passing through a time warp. One enters this particular Narnia not through a wardrobe but through a garage door in Turnbull’s Chittenden County home, which leads into a 9-by-12-foot sanctum sanctorum that would bring George Lucas to his knees in supplication.

So … how many items has he acquired? Turnbull chuckled. “Best not to ask,” he replied. “What you’re seeing is a small fraction of what exists.”

These are the designated “display pieces.” Backups and backups to the backups can be found among the hundreds of astronaut figurines, mini rockets, moon rovers, fantasy craft, commemorative buttons, space toys, games and DVDs of every cosmic-related movie, from 1956’s Forbidden Planet to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Is that … a photograph signed by all the original “Star Trek” crew?!

“My middle initial is E, so my nickname is Scott-E-Beam-Me-Up,” Turnbull said.

He got the space bug in the 1960s as the moon race heated up, embarking on a lifelong avocation of astronomy and model rocketry. His gateway drug to collecting was a toy called the Johnny Astro, a rudimentary launch platform. At the ripe old age of 9, living in upstate New York, Turnbull brought home an original G.I. Joe twinned with a spaceman. His collection had begun.

Rejected by NASA right out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Turnbull went to work for IBM in New York’s Hudson Valley. He married an engineer and requested a transfer to Vermont, where he and his wife, Ellen, raised their family. Now nearing 62 and bearing more degrees than a thermometer, he’s a computer systems engineer at the University of Vermont.

Turnbull is not a collector in the mold of the late billionaire Malcolm Forbes hunting for Fabergé eggs; his milieu is the flea market, toy shop or thrift store. He shops locally and thinks cosmically. He checks eBay auctions for “the more historical pieces,” he said.

If it isn’t already apparent, Turnbull’s collecting is a mirror image of his life’s work.

One of Turnbull’s most serendipitous finds was a five-inch button welcoming the Apollo 8 astronauts back to Earth — a relatively rare item that he obtained for less than the cost of two lattes. “I don’t usually expect to find things like that in a box of buttons at a flea market,” he marveled.

Though Turnbull is careful not to let the contents of his collection “leak” into the non-sanctified parts of his home, his wife is more than accepting. “We met at engineering school, so Ellen is similarly inclined,” he explained. “We would watch ‘Star Trek’ reruns.”

As for their three grown children, all are “tainted by the double-geek chromosome,” he said. Their son, the most passionate, is likely to assume guardianship of the collection when Turnbull beams up for eternity.

Before then, Turnbull hopes to find another copy of his treasured boyhood toy: Johnny Astro.

An apparent major omission among the scores of figurines on display was the lantern-jawed visage of Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story. Turnbull had an explanation at the ready.

“I don’t have a Buzz on these shelves, but there are a few in the collection,” he said. “I’ve done some head swaps to give other figures the benefit of the Space Ranger suit.”

— Steve Goldstein

---

Big Top Adventure

A beloved Vermont clown archives circus history through thousands of objects

Troy Wunderle does not simply collect circus memorabilia. He lives it and breathes it.

As the owner of Wunderle’s Big Top Adventures, he clowns, unicycles and stilt-walks throughout New England as a performer — and teaches kids to do the same through his educational residencies in schools. For 27 years, he coached and directed programs for Vermont’s beloved Circus Smirkus. He also spent six years as the director of clowning for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus shows.

“I collect because I love stories.” Troy Wunderle

So it makes sense that Wunderle’s home and spacious work studio in southern Vermont are filled with thousands of circus objects: posters, pennants, history books and children’s books, games, statuettes, toys, ticket stubs, photos, newspaper clippings, rubber noses, a few wagon wheels, and a pair of headdresses once worn by performing elephants.

“Look at this!” Wunderle exclaimed with the excitement of a longtime ringmaster, pointing out a faded but still glamorous shimmery costume in a glass case in his basement, worn by Rietta Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas, Ringling’s famous tightrope-walking troupe.

“And this!” Wunderle exclaimed again, opening a drawer full of Ringling programs that date back to the 1930s. “It’s amazing how you can look at circus programs and posters, or read through newspaper articles, and better understand what was happening in the world,” he said. “And reflect on how things have changed.”

Wunderle, 50, grew up in Saxtons River. From the time he was a little kid, he helped out at the nearby Stickney Hill Dairy. He draws a direct line between the hard-core work ethic he learned back then and what he calls the “incredibly hardworking people” who are the heart of a circus. Flipping through an album of historical Barnum & Bailey photos, Wunderle said, “It took thousands of employees — performers, band members, cooks, concessionaires, tent crew — all working together as a traveling city, setting up monster five-ring tents with miles of canvas and cable and rope. The intricacies just blow my mind.”

The first circus skill Wunderle mastered himself was juggling. He juggled to keep himself awake during late nights at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he earned a degree in graphic design and studied every medium he could, from sculpture to textiles. He kept juggling at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College and then landed a plum job touring with the renowned show for a year. His collecting began around the same time, initially with personal souvenirs, like the ticket stub and poster from the first Ringling show he ever performed in.

Today, Wunderle and his wife and collecting partner, Sara, seek out ephemera such as news articles, photographs and historical records, including an album of letters written by a circus cook in the late 1950s. “I’ll never be a circus cook,” Wunderle said, “but I feel like I’m living a piece of this guy’s life by reading his letters.”

Wunderle sees himself as an archivist and caretaker as much as a collector, preserving pieces of history to be passed on to the next generation of circus lovers. His collection, he said, holds little financial value for him. Yes, a few of his acquisitions cost thousands of dollars, but “I collect because I love stories,” he said, “and all of these objects have stories behind them.”

The objects with sentimental connections inspire him most, like the elephant headdresses that hang on a wall in his home. “I knew the elephant that wore one of them, and I knew the gentleman who taught the elephant that wore the other,” Wunderle explained. As a circus professional, he said, “I make it a point to honor and cherish those in the business who came before me.”

— Jennifer Sutton

---

The Dragon Hunter

Brandon Rivers isn’t toying around with his “Dragon Ball Z” collection

When it comes to his massive “Dragon Ball Z” collection, Brandon Rivers knows what some people think. He just doesn’t care.

“I’ve had people make fun of me. I’ve had girls break up with me because of it, even,” Rivers, 38, said at his home in Fair Haven. “But I’m proud of it. For a long time, I had nothing in my life. I’ve been homeless before, addicted to drugs and made some bad decisions.”

He paused as he considered the collection he’s spent the past seven years amassing. By his estimation, it includes well over 1,000 action figures and assorted memorabilia from the popular Japanese anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”

“My wife and I joke that if the house ever caught fire, it would be her, the cats, then the action figures.” Brandon Rivers

The New Hampshire native served two tours with the U.S. Army in Iraq but faced struggles as he adapted to civilian life afterward, including a 2015 arrest on drug charges. Then the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs helped him get back on his feet and find an apartment.

“After the VA helped me get my life back together and I got my first place, I started collecting the figures,” Rivers said. “Having them, it was something to show of mine, something I worked on instead of putting my money into booze or drugs. I worked so hard for this, and no one can take that away from me. So I’m just really proud of it.”

He started without knowing much about the collecting world, going purely off his passion for the anime that he grew up watching on Cartoon Network’s “Toonami,” which first aired “Dragon Ball” in the U.S. Rivers particularly identified with the show’s main character, Goku, a purehearted martial artist who embodies traits such as strength and a tenacious work ethic.

“I mean, who wouldn’t want to be superstrong and shoot beams out of their hands?” Rivers asked with a laugh. “But a lot of it was nostalgia for me. I still remember getting a coloring book from Japan when I was 8 with Goku in it and just being so blown away by the look of that world.”

After dipping his toes in the collector market, Rivers plunged in, becoming well known among “Dragon Ball” collectors. He gobbled up figures, from more common ones — which he will often remove from their boxes and display around his house — to the rare, desperately sought-after figures, which he keeps in their original boxes, hanging on his walls.

One such figure, a variant of a character called an Oozarus, is so rare, only 20 or so were ever made. Rivers said he has been offered $5,000 for it, but he rarely sells his most prized pieces, barring special circumstances.

“There’s a lot of money to be made, and plenty of people collect just to sell,” he said. When Rivers moved from Keene, N.H., to Vermont last year, he ended up selling a few rare figures to help cover the down payment on a new house. “I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to get those figures again, but, I mean … they got me a house for me and my family.”

There’s no endgame for Rivers or grand plan for what happens to his collection in the future. He just knows he plans to continue collecting — provided he can find the space. An entire room of his house is now dedicated to the collection, and it’s starting to spill out into other rooms, as well.

“My wife and I joke that if the house ever caught fire, it would be her, the cats, then the action figures,” Rivers said with a smile. “It’s funny, but it’s true. They just really mean a lot to me.”

— Chris Farnsworth

This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2023.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!